Publisher DTP Crew

This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. This series of interviews features Kevin Foreman, who was a general manager for the Helix division at RealNetworks at the time this video was shot.

Kevin Foreman is a filmmaker's dream. He is articular, handsome, and delivers awesome soundbites. Meaning that he states his opinion clearly and concisely. A documentary filmmaker is concerned less with whether an interviewee agrees with the films basic premise than how well that interviewee gives his or her opinion. In the case of Kevin Foreman, he says what he knows and he knows what he says, and he does so with no wasted words. Awesome.

Kevin Foreman covers a lot of ground in these interviews. He brags that RealNetworks is the only company that offers video and audio in mpeg3, mpeg4, ogg theora, ogg vorbis, and Real's own proprietary formats. He boasts that Real has 350 million downloads of its free (as in beer) proprietary player software, and that software runs on GNU-Linux, Mac, and Windows.

He says that Real chose to use Free Open Source Software models for its Helix code because "if you want to beat Bobby Fisher, don't play chess", meaning that you can't beat Microsoft in the arena of selling software. What he's really saying here is that Real is using what Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen calls an "asymmetrical market shield", meaning do something that the market leader can't do -- give away your software to the consumer, and sell to industry.

Kevin says that Real went through gut-wrenching changes to decide to allow Helix to be developed as Free Open Source Software -- because the Helix code was previously proprietary. But the risk paid off, because Real got 45,000 developers as a result, but only anticipated 10,000 developers signing up to help.

He says that Free Open Source Software empowers the consumer by giving them the information they need to compete on an even playing field with even large vendors, like Ford, which had a problem that consumers found out about due to news broadcasts. He said that Microsoft will need to change and adapt to this new environment. He says that Microsoft is a nimble company, and can adapt.

He says that Real uses GNU-Linux on the back end to keep their servers up because stability is key when you are delivering Major League Baseball and other similar types of feed to major customers like CBS, which expect 100% 24/7/365 up-time. He says that Microsoft Windows was not able to provide that kind of reliability. So Real chose Linux for stability first, and cost maybe second or third.

If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeld@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_037

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 005, Kevin Foreman
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

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Contact Information Christian Einfeldt, einfeldt at g mail dot com